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CHRISTCHURCH MAIL, DECEMBER 12, 2013 31 male blooms. This is quite normal and warrants no concern – female flowers are only produced when the plants are big enough to support fruit. Save for one or two needed for pollination, these male flowers serve no real function, but picked off your pumpkin or zucchini plants, they make delicious fritters or can be stuffed, battered and deep-fried until crisp. Alternatively, try shredding them into a cream-based pasta sauce, with a little saffron and white wine. Pick the flowers in the morning before they fold up in the sun, but check for any insects lurking inside before using – stowaway bees aren’t at all unusual. Female flowers can be eaten as well, but Make a meal from male cucurbit flowers W By VIRGIL EVETTS hen cucurbits start flowering, they tend to produce only fruitless become lost beneath the leaves. The problem with this is that the grapes won’t get enough sun to ripen properly, and could succumb to downy mildew because of the reduced air movement and high humidity. To get around this problem, WETFEET: Kang Kong or water spinach is milder than itscommoncousin. at the expense of potential fruit. These are easily distinguishable, as they have a little bulb at the bottom of the flower where fruit will form following pollination. Mollycoddle your melons Melons need more heat than any of their cucurbit cousins, so it’s best to hold off for another few weeks or so. Keep the young plants protected in their pots until mid-December. The crucial ■ This column is adapted from the weekly e-zine Get Growing from New Zealand Gardener magazine. For a free sample visit getgrowing.co.nz or to subscribe visit mags4gifts.co.nz or call 0800 MAGS4GIFTS. elements for success with melons seem to be warm nights and days, and plenty of water to begin with – but not too much when fruit starts forming. A cold watery blast Woolly aphids on apple trees and whitefly on citrus can reach plague proportions in summer, stunting growth, damaging fruit, and creating a general eyesore. Blast them away with water from your hose. Keep doing this every couple of weeks and you should eventually gain the upper hand. Trim back grapevines Grapevines grow like the clappers once the hot weather gets going. So much so that any fruit can clear out any fruitless canes and prune others back to within two or three leaves of a bunch. Only thin the actual fruit if you’re hung up on having picture-perfect bunches. Otherwise, just leave them all there and enjoy the musky-sweet bounty come late summer. You’re bound to lose some fruit to birds and wasps anyway, so it’s better to have more coming on than you need. A taste of Thai My top Thai cooking essential for the garden is: ❚ Kang kong or water spinach. Water spinach – formal name Ipomoea aquatica – is a semiaquatic member of the morning glory family, and is probably the most common leafy green used in Thai cooking. The leaves and stems are either stir-fried, added to soups, or stirred into curries. It has a texture akin to spinach when cooked, but offes a milder, more mineral flavour. The hollow stems are pleasingly crunchy too. Kang kong grows quickly from seed pressed into wet potting mix and kept warm, or from cuttings left in water for a few days. You can buy water spinach seeds from Asian Seeds and from Kings Seeds. PATAKA XMAS SHOP Now Open Every Day from 10 am - 4 pm 768 Marshland Road, (Nth End) 03 323 8915 Ads in the Christchurch Mail work twice as hard as those in The Star! Each Thursday the Christchurch Mail is read by 138,000 people. To reach this many people with The Star you need to advertise in both editions. Christchurch’s largest circulating community newspaper To talk about how to maximise the effectiveness of your advertising investment, call Sharee Brosnan on 03 943 2647 today. *Source: Nielsen CMI Survey Q42012 – Q32013. Base: AP15+. Readership: The Star Midweek, 124,000; The Star Weekend, 107,000; Total weekly readership, 138,000. 5665666AA